Phill adroitly responded:
The moral point is not that there is risk of being caught, it is that society has made laws and unless there are exceptional circumstances it is a duty to obey those laws.
[Nice try, Phill.] The moral cowardice to which I was referring had nothing to do with obeying or disobeying a silly law. It had to do with Phill's citing of same as a craven excuse to neither admit he was wrong nor to risk anything on the validity of his pronouncement.
Actually the original reply I made was simply one of a number of objections to what is a very silly argument. I could have equally answered that way had you actually proposed a duel or that we "step outside". It is a very silly mode of argument and desrves to be answered in the same manner (if at all). The essential humourless of your reply is indicated by your failure to realise that my conversion of your 25L into 2 cents was satirical.
Phill invokes the classic straw man arguement. What the bet does do is to test the courage of one's convictions. I think it is obvious to all where Phill fits into this equation.
And precisely what does that demonstrate? We are debating the issue of whether Rush's retreat from TV is a result of failure, or more specifically whether we should believe Rush's spin on the matter. The truth or falsehood of that argument is indifferent to the depth of my belief that Rush is a big fat idiot or not. One of my friends left CERN to join Netscape a few years back. He now worth probably $10 million plus as a result. I don't think that his intelligence relative to Rush was in any way dependent on that decision. He would still be way smarter than Rush either way and Marvin Minsky would be smarter than both. Only guy I have ever met who was super rich who impressed me as an intellectual force was Bill Gates - apart that is from friends who inherited silly amounts of money. Phill